Networks slicing is a concept usually associated with 5G. Let's have a look why. Let's start by asking what is 5G? 5G is the next generation of cellular networks. It's going to bring some new things and differences from previous generations. If we started with 2G and looking at what 2G delivered, it was mostly voice and telephony. 3G also delivered data, but it really was 4G the one that brought with it the explosion of mobile broadband with very fast data rates and relatively low latency. 5G will continue that, it will still continue to deliver those type of services, much higher throughput, much lower latency but with it, there's going to be also other type of tools and other type of technologies like ultra reliable, like massive IoT, like low latency that are more focused on delivering services to things and devices than just consumers. So, 5G is going to have a much wider range with a much wider umbrella of capability than the previous generations that were strictly more focused on consumers. Because of the breadth of capability that 5G brings, it is considered one of the key enablers of the new data economy under digital transformation that is occurring at the moment in various sectors. If we look, for example, at an autonomous car, an autonomous car generates one gigabyte of data per second. A smart hospital generates up to 4,000 gigabytes of data per day. That even gets dwarfed by a connected factory that can generate up to one million of gigabytes per day. All this data that these smart and connected things are generating, needs to be transported to where it can be analyzed and insights gathered from. 5G is a key enabler of that. It's one of the key technologies that can transport reliably all these huge amounts of data that is being generated by these type of smart things, to the cloud where it can be processed and analyzed. The 5G capabilities can be categorized in three different buckets. We will look at ultra-reliability and low latency often referred to as mission critical. This type of capability can enable many different types of use cases such as, healthcare, remote surgery, for example, or autonomous driving, or it can really provide a platform for emergency services to communicate safely and in real time. It can also provide the capabilities to a drone to self-fly. The second type of capability that 5G brings is the massive machine to machine connectivity. This type of capability that 5G brings is primarily focused on connecting very big number of devices to the network that typically don't send significant amount of data. They may send short bursts occasionally, there may be sensors but sometimes they're not located close to the base station. Sometimes they're located far apart, such as smart agriculture. We may say a big farm that has some sensors located out of normal reach of the network, or in a smart factory where indoors, the coverage is poor. So, this is a different type of capability that 5G brings. Lastly, the third bucket or the third category of capability is enhanced mobile broadband. This type of capability can enable different type of use cases. From virtual and merged reality, to broadband at home, to gaming, entertainment, high-quality video streaming, and also mobile office. Because of the wide variety of requirements that these different use cases bring to the network, it's why we have in 5G the concept of network slice. Each different type of network slice can deliver different type of capability. The requirements of our wireless broadband networks slice that is required to deliver high bandwidth, for example, to a device such as a smartphone, will be very different to the type of ultra low latency and real time control that an autonomous car needs, so the autonomous car will have a different type of slice to deliver that type of service. The same goes for IoT and sensors that require very small bandwidth, very small energy consumption to ensure that there is long battery life, with very small amounts of data being transmitted in bursts every so often. A different type of slice could be video streaming, where you are transmitting very high-quality video to a larger device such as a smart TV, that is ultra-high-definition. The concepts of 5G and networks slices are very related to the network transformation that we are seeing, happening in the market over the last few years. Network transformation is about moving from physical appliances to more of a software-defined network, where the use of general purpose computing is extended all the way from the core network to the edge. Because the 5G network and the different slices that it needs to implement will require very different architectures with very different topologies, being able to use software and being able to use general-purpose computing platforms is going to be a key aspect of 5G. As our key example, edge computing as an element of network transformation is going to be one of the key enablers of low latency communications.
